Cedar Picket Fence Completed!

The fence is finished! What an experience. Today I put together the gates and replaced a couple damaged pickets. The fence was pretty much done last weekend aside from the gates.

This was a true learning experience. For those thinking about putting up your own fence, I recommend putting the project into prospective. How ever long you think the project will take, quadruple that number. I thought the fence could be put up over a 2 day weekend, it’s taken one 3 day weekend and two and a half 2 day weekends to get the fence done. Granted, I spent a lot of time leveling each picket and using screws instead of nails. I think a nail gun would have shaved 1 day off the project. Had we not run into WOW’s cable line a number of times while digging, I think we would have saved 1/2 a day digging holes too.

Anyway, fence is up and it looks great!

4 comments on "Cedar Picket Fence Completed!"

Staining is Phase 3. 🙂 No rush, need to let the wood dry out for a couple months before applying a stain. Luckily I will not have to wait long to apply a stain. I’ve been told you have to wait a year before staining pressure treated pine.

We dug all the holes at once. This is because you want to keep your tasks focused to save time. If you can get 5+ folks to help you, you could have one team dig holes with the auger and another team mixing and setting the cement and setting the posts, but looking back I would not recommend it.

You should always measure twice and cut once. I believe we actually spaced our posts 7′ 9″ in order to give us room in case some posts ended up +/- 4″ from each other. I also have two runs that were purposely more than 10′ apart to avoid utility lines in the ground. You can purchase 2″ x 4″ x 12′ cedar runs to use as extra long rails, but keep in mind that wind will apply more stress to them the further apart your posts are.